Beautiful Badbury

When this blog passed its 2000th post I said I wasn't going to be striving to find something to say every other day, as I had in the past, but only post when there was something positive happening. Nothing very much has gone on today apart from a trip to Dorset to see my mum, going out with her for a meal, and visiting the farm shop at Pamphill Dairy, finishing with my obligatory walk around Badbury Rings. But Badbury Rings is always restful and calming, and maybe you find my photos the same! Today I did the opposite of my usual route of going straight through the monument and then following the southern ramparts back, by turning north along the banks and then cutting back through the wooded centre. I couldn't remember ever seeing the Trig. pillar before, somehow.

Leave Miscellanea

Although I'm not really posting about things that don't relate to the church, my post-Easter leave this week did take me to Dorset and St Catherine's Chapel at Abbotsbury, which I found still a bit forlorn as its west window remains boarded up awaiting repair by English Heritage. For the first time in about twenty years there was no votive deposit at all apart from a few candle stubs and a bundle of dry flowers and the prayer I left on a scrap of paper was the sole offering. 

On Tuesday I had a trip to Rochester having not seen the Cathedral since I left the area in 1997. Not a single image of St Catherine there: in fact there are very few female saints represented at all, and most of the holy figures are military, fitting in with the martial tone of much of the cathedral. I walked along the road to Chatham, checking the house where I used to live (which looks exactly the same) and St John's Church where I once worshipped. When I left the town the congregation was on the brink of decamping to Emmaus, the United Reform Church on the right side of the ring road which had left the poor Anglican church isolated from the town centre, and St John's spent a while derelict before the Diocese of Rochester decided they wanted to reopen it. Now apparently the congregation is moving out to Emmaus yet again - but only temporarily, while the church is refurbished.

Yesterday I was in London and found another tiny St Catherine hiding on some Netherlandish stained glass in Sir John Soane's Museum. I doubt anyone else has ever noticed her!

I was in town to see the Cult of Beauty exhibition at the Wellcome with Lady Wildwood before we both went to hear Bettany Hughes speak about the Seven Wonders of the World, but strangely what caught my interest most was her incidental remark about Karahan Tepe in Turkey, 'a city in a time and place where there shouldn't be one'. She's overstating slightly it being a 'city', but it certainly does seem to be a permanent settlement with sophisticated monuments (including a ritual chamber of gigantic penis pillars) dating back over 11,000 years and possibly more. The carvings show lots of people with six fingers on their hands, and the whole site was deliberately buried after a couple of millennia. I'm mortified I had never heard of this! 

More about Karahan Tepe here.

Christmas 2023

It was pretty similar to last year in terms of numbers, the Cribbage and Midnight very much the same, 8am a bit down, and 10am a bit up. The fact that it was one of those years when the Fourth Sunday of Advent magically transforms into Christmas Eve at mid-day didn't seem to make that much of a difference to anyone except me and the team of souls who staff the services, who were spread a bit thin between six services, not to mention Carols by Candlelight last Friday night. 

After last year's experiences, I rethought the Midnight: rather than attempt a grandeur we can't manage, we went for intimacy instead, abandoning the old high altar, not having anyone in the choir (two choristers were present but sat in the congregation), and having subdued lighting and lots of candles. I was just thinking that for the first time I could remember the service had gone without any mishap at all when Margaret who was one of the eucharistic ministers knocked one of my huge pillar candles over and sent wax spinning over the dais the altar sits on. At least it hadn't been Tim the crucifer as, in his polyester robe (we still use the ones a churchwarden made in 1975), he would have gone up like a candle himself. 

On Christmas Day I attended the Churches Together Christmas Lunch, ending up giving three of the guests a lift after various people went down with a norovirus. I ended up sitting with a Nigerian gentleman, a woman from Sierra Leone and her small daughter, and a Sri Lankan nurse working in one of the local care homes. Somehow we began talking about Reformation history, and it was quite agreeable to explain about Lady Jane Grey and Henry VIII's wives to people who wouldn't have been able to pick me up on the bits I'd forgotten about. They still knew more about the history of the British monarchy than I do about those of West Africa or Ceylon, though. They had no idea about the UK Christmas tradition of the monarch's speech. The Lunch organisers had some trouble with the audiovisuals and so we ended up watching Chucky Boy on the TV while his words were played through a mic off someone's phone, with a delay of about 3 seconds which was most disconcerting.

Down in Dorset for Boxing Day, I, my sister and elder niece went for a little walk over Turbary Common, that charismatic landscape of my childhood. As I and Lady Arlen discovered last year, there are cows there now, and they were there today. I can't tell you how odd it is to see these bovine presences so close to a very suburban environment I am very familiar with.

A Piece of Time

My sweep around the centre of Ely a couple of weeks ago finished (as the rain began to fall) with a very rapid visit to an antiques centre by the Great Ouse, curtailed by it closing, I thought a bit too sharply. On one of the upstairs stalls was a nice ammonite. I've wanted an ammonite for ages, and there are very few things I want. But then I realised that what I wanted wasn't just any old ammonite, but a Dorset ammonite, so I came away not with a fossil but a 19th-century print of the Ruins of Hierapolis. I'll have to find a place for that somewhere. 

I'm not quite sure when South Dorset became 'The Jurassic Coast': it wasn't 185 million years ago, because it wasn't that when I was a child and actually lived a few miles away. Perhaps it was 2001, the year when the area became a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its geology, features, and natural beauty; since then the tag has become crucial in the marketing of Dorset to tourists, and even the bus which runs along the sea road is known as the Jurassic Coaster. And the central and most charismatic icon of that whole identity is the coil of the ammonite.

The ammonite appears everywhere in south Dorset, decorating shops, hotels, brochures and bus stops. It's set into the ground outside Lyme Regis Museum, and on the town's lampposts. It even lends its name to a movie, as a symbol of the woman who has become herself a symbol, Mary Anning - again, in my childhood she was just a curiosity, but now, recast as a brilliant, misunderstood gay scientist in a peak bonnet with a basket full of fossils, she strangely binds in her own person past and present, and makes a landscape of cliffs and crashing seas hold contemporary imaginings. In her new statue at Lyme, only unveiled last year, she both holds an ammonite, and they decorate the hem of her skirts.

So I conceded that an ammonite would cost about £10 per inch of Jurassic stone, and went about the not-very-difficult task of sourcing one on Ebay. Here it is: it came not from the coast, but from Bradford Abbas, a long way inland but at the bottom of the same sea as (say) Burton Bradstock would have been 170 million years ago when the rock that held it was laid down. That doesn't matter. Its coil moves inward and pastward to the lost ages that have made the holy land of Dorset, and all of us. I disentangled it from its packaging, held it, and felt unexpectedly tearful.

Sandbanks in the Sun

A trip to Dorset to see my family can involve going to Poole Cemetery to tidy up my grandparents' and father's graves: Mum would do it, but can't at the moment. She warned me they would be in a terrible state yesterday, but they weren't, the dry weather having shrivelled all the weeds that otherwise make a nuisance of themselves among the pebbles.

On the way between there and Mum's the sun glinted across Poole Harbour, the expensive apartments and houses of Banks Road slightly hazy beyond the windsurfers. The buildings periodically change as fashions do, but they maintain their long, low line strung out along the sandy spit that closes the mouth of the Harbour from the north. On the eastern side are deep sands and waves; on the western flank, the tranquil waters that stretch all across to Brownsea Island, and that was where we typically took up our seaside positions when I was small. Going back to Sandbanks is always an exercise in the pleasures of memory as well as experience.

Dorset in Winter

Taken shakily on my phone - I discovered I'd brought the camera bag with me but not the camera itself! - these photos are not spectacular, but I was glad to be back in Dorset for the day going out with my sister to Abbotsbury and then to West Bay. The former was very quiet - the only other visitors we saw were a group of walkers who came into the café where we had our Blue Vinney baguettes - but there was a surprising number of people making their way around the little harbour a mile south of Bridport. It's the first time in years that Chapel Hill has been deserted apart from the cows: but then it looks a little forbidding, the east window boarded up after the glass has clearly been cracked. People were clearly there around Christmas as there were the remains of decorations and some Christmas-contextual messages left in the prayer niches. 

Swanvale Halt Book Club: 'Tess' by Emma Tennant (1994)

When Emma Tennant’s Tess went into shops in 1994, I hope nobody bought it looking for a light bit of romantic fiction with a happy ending. That’s what you might conclude it was, based on the cover, but if so you’d be sadly disappointed. I thought I had to read it after tackling Queen of Stones earlier in the year, and anticipated it would be a baleful piece of work to judge by its predecessor. I hadn’t expected my initial confusion: Tess is the title, and there are three Tesses – it’s a theme of the book that the fate of women repeats in successive generations, ‘the ballad is played and played again’ – the fictional one imagined by Thomas Hardy, the narrator Liza-Lu’s sister, and the baby to whom the story is being told. There are also two Marys, the narrator’s mother, and her niece. Deft writer as she is, Tennant keeps pointing out in the text who is being referred to, but it takes a while to get your head around the repetitions. There are other aspects of the book that you might struggle to get your head around: it’s moving towards the revelation of a secret, repeatedly signalled by the narrator in case we forget it’s coming, which might have seemed shocking in 1994 but now feels predictable; and the narrative is broken up by wodges of a feminist manifesto which may, or may not, be the author’s own. It might have been better to let the story make the point.

And the point is pointed enough, and well enough made, when the tale gets the chance to: that females are the raw material of the fantasies of males, and suffer for it. Baby Tess, granddaughter of Liza-Lu’s sister Tess, represents the generation who might break the cycle and begin the healing of both humanity and the earth (the novel’s environmental urgency was unusual for the time). Part of Tennant’s programme is to wrest control of the Dorset landscape from Thomas Hardy, and she never misses an opportunity to insult or malign him: in this novel he becomes not a complex and divided man with deep flaws, but an unmitigated monster, so captivated by the imaginary woman he creates that he manipulates and damages every real one he  has anything to do with. The action takes place between Abbotsbury, West Bay and Beaminster, the landscape spared the phantasmagoric treatment evident in Queen of Stones so that Tennant’s characters can realistically inhabit it. She imagines the eagles on the gateposts at Mapperton House coming alive, and mentions in passing the old nightclub that ran on the coast road out of Bridport near Burton Bradstock, and you have to be fairly familiar with the history of Dorset to know about that. Casterbridge seems a long way away.

Tess is ambitious and extreme, but not so complex that you can’t look past its flaws. It’s never going to displace the ‘real’ Tess, but it does enough to stake a place in Hardy’s shadow, insisting that his vision isn’t the only way of looking at Dorset, and at humanity.

The Manner of Our Departure

It was a beautiful, elegaic moment as Jodie Whittaker’s 13th Doctor regenerated yesterday evening into – well, if you don’t mind spoilers, an earlier version of herself. And every Dorset native will have been squee-ing to see where she chose to watch ‘one last sunrise’ – the unmistakable outline of Durdle Door on the Purbeck coast. My first thought was how lovely it was, and my second how aghast the Dorset emergency services would be at the prospect of viewers thinking it might be fun to try and recreate the moment. Sure enough, the Lulworth Estate which owns Durdle Door has denounced the BBC’s ‘duplicity’ (now that’s a strong word) in not telling it what the request to film at the limestone arch would actually produce. There’s no safe way along the top of the headland and people have been badly injured diving off it. Unless you actually have access to a TARDIS, it’s best admired from a distance.

‘It’s such a shame you can’t pick the date, time, place and manner of departure, isn’t it? Well, you can in some sense, but that’s obviously more likely to be a messy route, and I don’t like mess’, mused Ms Kittywitch to us the other day. Ms K, who has battled a bewildering variety of medical dangers since before her heart-and-lung transplant at the age of 13, now faces a new diagnosis I can barely remember, and a new drug which might buy her another X years or finish her off with an allergic reaction. She is right, though I would choose not a sunrise on Durdle Door (or indeed chucking myself off it), but a rainy late afternoon on Chesil Beach, the ‘melancholy, long withdrawing roar’ of the Lyme Bay seas on the shingle. I can’t see how that could be managed, though, and might have to settle for Dorothy Parker’s more realistic option: ‘O let it be a night of lyric rain/And singing breezes when my bell is tolled’.

Most of us will be ushered from this earthly existence as part of a medical drama. On Thursday night I was called to the hospital to see Edgar: Jackie, his wife, apologised for calling me on my day off once she realised that’s what it was, but I’ve learned that you mustn’t delay these things if you can help it, and had we left it to Friday morning Edgar would have been unresponsive. It was hard to understand him, beyond the single word 'Amen'. His operation months ago to correct an essential tremor was successful but his enjoyment of it never materialised as his recuperation was interrupted by a fall and broken ankle, pneumonia and finally a fatal infection. That’s how it goes. Not for most of us the singing breezes or the crashing waves, but the quiet of a ward side room and the hiss of an oxygen mask, and as much faith as, with God’s grace, we can muster.

Ambulance Chasing

It was a chance for a last Summer day out for my sister's family. They were intending to go for a walk along the cliff paths around Worth Matravers. Driving towards the village, they saw a gentleman coming towards them on a bicycle. He was a bit wobbly. Suddenly he appeared to lose control of the bike, fell off onto the road, and stayed there. 

They came to a halt abruptly. My brother-in-law went to alert any traffic coming up the blind hill to the south while my sister checked the victim and their daughters acted in a supervisory capacity. The poor fellow was unconscious and bleeding dramatically from a cut to the head - he hadn't been wearing a helmet. The advice from 999 was not what my sister was anticipating. 'We can get an ambulance to you in about five hours. Do you have a towel to staunch the bleeding? Can you move him to the side of the road?' The road, as those who know the area might anticipate, doesn't have any sides, at least not any that would keep someone out of the way of vehicles. 

After about twenty minutes, the injured man was coming round and my sister and brother-in-law called 999 again. They discovered - and it's at this point that the story becomes hard to credit - that the original call hadn't been logged. This time, the incident was recorded 'but the ambulance will still take about five hours. Can you take him to the cottage hospital in Swanage?' 'But he's hit his head, is that safe?' asked my sister. 'It's probably the best option', was the reply.

Well, Swanage is only five miles away so that was naturally what they did. The bike was an electric contraption which the gentleman had on approval with the intention of buying it. They took it to the local pub and asked if they could look after it. 'The landlord said yes', reported my sister, 'as though it was the kind of thing that happens every day'. We suspect that as soon as their car drove off, he was on the phone to Andy the Fence in Wareham, and that bike was on its way to a new owner.

My sister and family did get their walk, albeit delayed by a couple of hours. However, it is rather sobering to reflect that the emergency services are now expecting ordinary members of the public to get potentially seriously-injured people to hospital. I'd advise you all not to do anything that could injure you, or put you in the way of someone who might be ... !

Dorset Deco - Survivals and Perils

A trip to Dorset yesterday gave me the chance to revisit some of the Poole-and-Bournemouth area's Art Deco buildings which I last paid any serious attention to some two decades ago. In fact I had never paid any attention at all to the Ice Cream Kiosk in Poole Park, but this quite splendidly survives, even if at the moment it is selling not ice cream but dog portraits:

I reviewed some of the houses on Sandbanks Road, and got improved photos of the Harbour Heights development at Sandbanks, designed by the area's premier Art Deco architect at the time, AJ Seal. This is the house he would have known as The Conning Tower, redeveloped as a block of apartments called Conning Towers in the early 2000s:

Now, I haven't visited the town centre of Bournemouth for some years. My sister's report was that the pandemic and the accelerated economic dislocations that have come with it have resulted in an environment so depressing that on her last visit she ended up going to the Library as it was the only place that seemed to offer any cheer. I didn't find it that bad, though a couple of the main commercial streets have been battered by the closure of the big department stores; I will say more about that another time, but as far as the Art Deco buildings are concerned they are mostly intact, from the humbler stores you can see here to the grander ones such as Seal's Palace Court Hotel and the Echo building on Richmond Hill.

The grand Brights Building on Old Christchurch Road is suffering a bit from the closure of House of Fraser which used to occupy most of it, notwithstanding being one of only three Listed Art Deco buildings in the Dorset conurbation.

Saddest of all, though, is Hinton Road, whose south side is a scene of devastation from the YMCA building onwards. The very first building AJ Seal designed in Art Deco style, the old Palace Court Theatre, has apparently been bought from the church that used to occupy it by Bournemouth Arts University who intend to restore it, so hopefully its future is secure, but Seal's own offices at Palace Court Chambers next door are a wreck. There's even an upstairs window which is entirely knocked out: heaven knows what's going to happen to it.

The Majestic Garage building, long used for offices and an NCP car park, is derelict too, and I had never noticed before the sprawling redbrick building that occupies the long plot to its west. Its days must be numbered. Curiously Google Maps lists it as the home of a private detective agency called 'Fallen Angel Investigations', which given the state of the building sounds like an idea for a TV series.

Swanvale Halt Book Club: Review, PJ Harvey, 'Orlam' (Picador, 2022)

When Polly Harvey was four, she found a dead lamb in the woods near her house: the crows had pecked its eyes out. At home, her parents had just bought Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and had it on the turntable endlessly. Thereafter, she said, that record never failed to make her feel physically sick; though it took until the 2010s before she would admit in interviews why it did. Harvey takes this horrible experience and spins out of it her second collection of poetry, Orlam.

Her protagonist Ira-Abel Rawles is nine, and lives in the fictional Dorset village of UNDERWHELEM – in the text, it’s always capitalised, as though in a print transcription of Domesday Book. It’s a place where females and animals are never safe from predation of different kinds. Not that Ira thinks of herself as female, as her double name suggests – she’s a ‘not-gurrel’, she insists, a ‘wether on the nether-edge’ who should have been born a ‘tarble tup’, and who identifies with Joan of Arc as well as the lambs she has a reluctant hand (literally) in castrating. That sexual ambiguity will not protect her. All this also opens out of Harvey’s childhood, though I hope not much of the rest of the story does, or I doubt she’ll ever be able to show her face in her home village of Corscombe again (1).

I say ‘story’, and that is what Orlam is – a verse novel spanning a calendar year and written, as the quotes so far make clear, in old Dorset dialect mainly lifted from William Barnes’s 1886 Dictionary; so the ‘tarble tup’ Ira imagines she might have been is, in what Barnes would have called ‘book-English’, a ‘tolerable ram’. Readers should not imagine that Harvey would actually have heard much of this during her real 1970s Dorset upbringing, beyond perhaps the odd word: instead it’s a very conscious anachronism that allows the author to prise open Ira’s experience, its earthy Anglo-Saxon shapes generating a very particular relationship between that, the landscape, and the people around her. The dialect doesn’t entirely lift us away from West Dorset in the 1970s – the jerrycans and sheep-dip chemicals see to that – but it gives that setting a depth and resonance which makes it seem a landscape of myth.

Ira creates her own myths, to cope with the horrors she encounters. The dead lamb’s eyeball becomes Orlam, her guardian spirit, floating over the fields on its trailing optic nerve; in the only place she finds refuge, Gore Woods, she meets the bleeding Civil War soldier Wyman-Elvis and his entourage of ghosts, and the Ash-Wraiths, the shades of every child who has ever played there. She ‘scratches’ out her myths, her sorrows and enmities, writing to take control of what she undergoes. She needs these spectral allies, because she has few enough among the human residents of Underwhelem. She loves her mother, but her mother is neglectful and absent; she loves her grandmother (called Mary, like Harvey’s own), but Mary is dead, and hovers over the hollow lane; she adores her elder brother Kane-Jude, but he betrays her (predestined by his names, Cain and Judas). The rest, from Ira’s drunken, inadequate father Chalmers-Adam, to Emerson-Dogger Bowditch who rapes her in the Red Shed, are deserving objects of her scorn and hatred. She casts spells against them (apparently successfully in her father’s case), and makes songs to defend herself. It’s a mythology woven from plants and wildlife, the details of sheep-rearing, Shakespeare, pop songs and weather rhymes, Christian imagery, and Dorset folklore (2), and makes a heady enough mix – though the intoxicant isn’t good old Dorset cider, but the cheap whisky and Palmer’s bitter served up in Underwhelem’s grotty pub, the Golden Fleece.

I often find that I have to reorientate myself to get into a new PJ Harvey album, and this book turned out the same: it took me three reads before it really gelled. It isn’t hard to read: you can tackle it quite quickly, and in fact I think it helps to read it quickly, once you’re familiar with the rich but restricted vocabulary of the dialect. Polly’s mentor Don Paterson’s simultaneous ‘English’ translations of her words are best ignored as they will mislead you into one particular reading of a multivocal text. I found at first that the poem’s conventions, such as the capitalisation of placenames and the fabricated names of the characters, separated me from the emotion it should have contained, but after repeated readings those distractions faded. And they may only be Ira’s imaginings anyway, though Harvey has been rightly non-committal about that. So I got there, in the end.

But it is brutal. ‘Sex and death all roundabout/Sonny with ‘es eyes pecked out/Scoff the vlesh vlee and the yis/This is how the wordle is’. Ira excepted, all the living characters are grotesques, who seem to exist only to cause others pain, notably her. The miasma of horror barely lifts, whether it’s the dramatic hideousness of the pervert forester John Forsey dressing as the Dorset Ooser, or the more prosaic terrors of the new school term, which Ira dreads so much she throws up on her teacher’s shoes. The Christ-figure (that’s how Harvey describes him, not me) Wyman-Elvis hands The Word to Ira – in Presley’s phrase, love me tender, a marker of hope amid the evil, but she finds it hard to hold onto it. For all Orlam’s skill, its near-relentless morbidity is wearing, as though Harvey is working through something. Mind you, if this still doesn’t represent the mature outworking of her poetic voice, what might be to come?

The book ends with a recapitulation of its first lyric, ‘Prayer at the Gate’, in almost Christian terms:

So look before and look behind

At life and death all innertwined

And teake towards your dark-haired Lord

Forever bleeding with The Word.

By now, the end of the year and the beginning of a new one, Ira’s mother seems to have resurfaced, her father appears to have succumbed to the curse Ira laid on him, and the ghost of her childhood has joined the Ash-Wraiths while she carries on into a more knowing near-adolescence. And that’s as optimistic as Orlam gets. It is, I think, a brilliant achievement, but hard to take, and even harder – for me, yet – to love.

(There haven't been that many reviews of Orlam yet, either because people don't know what to make of it, or hate it but are too polite to say so. You can have a look at this one, or this, or this.)

1.Earnest Pollywatchers heard drafts of these poems as far back as 2017 when she read them at King’s Place in London. They've hardly altered, but where they have it's weakened the specific local references. So the early version of ‘Black Saturday’ described Ira and her brother playing war in ‘Luther’s Coppice’, a real location in Corscombe; in the book, this has become ‘Blaggot’s Copse’.

2.I especially like the references to the Red Post which in the book is ‘UNDERWHELEM’s hanging post’ (p.75). There are four real Red Posts in Dorset, roadside waymarkers, and because nobody really knows why they are coloured red, you can make up what you like. I think of them as the mystic axial points around which the county revolves, which rivet it into its past. The nearest to Corscombe is at Benville Bridge. 

Books: 'Queen of Stones' by Emma Tennant (1982)

Lady Arlen alerted me to Tom Cox’s novel Villager, set somewhere that might be Dorset or might be Devon but isn’t quite either, and out last month. He mentions it in a brilliant evocation of a visit to the Isle of Portland and, in passing, called attention to a far older book located in that bleak and wondrous landscape – Emma Tennant’s Queen of Stones from 1982, in which a schoolgirls’ sponsored walk ends in ‘sacrificial rituals in the dark places beneath the clifftops’. I had to get it after that, hadn’t I?

Class, scorn, sexuality, jealousy and dreadful violence mingle in this short book (it seemed more coherent on a race-paced second reading that took about an hour, than spread across several bleary-eyed bedtime sessions) which is a sort of reknitting of Lord of the Flies, in the same way that Emma Tennant mangled a variety of classics in a feminist direction – more superficially as time went by, some critics argued. The girls vary from Class Four of Melplash Primary, who function as a chorus (average age: six and two months), to Bess Plantain, elegant and apparently superior but deeply mixed-up nearly-thirteen-year-old who indentifies rather too closely with Elizabeth I. Suddenly engulfed in ‘the thickest fog ever seen in West Dorset’, the party are separated from their adult leader and wander catastrophically off-course, going missing for the better part of five days. They spend the last bit of this ordeal isolated in a quarry on Portland, where the tensions and fantasies they have brought with them culminate in a terrible, cathartic resolution. Returning to reality, none of them can quite remember how it came about, or choose not to. What happens in the fog, stays in the fog.

Queen of Stones is brilliant – provided you can take such strong stuff – yet impossible, really, to swallow. Mingled with the elliptical main text which prises beneath the girls’ reactions and experiences are authoritative comments on them by a psychiatrist, a social worker, and a bishop, delivered in their own idioms. The narrative is as fragmentary as the text is intense, and you have to concentrate; you also have to deal with two of the characters being the objects of adult sexual interest in a way which I suspect nobody would dare to write now. The overall effect is still dazzling, but you can’t help wondering if it’s all a trick. The unnamed author was, they state, ‘staying with friends nearby … recovering from an illness’ at the time of the case and decided to occupy their time ‘attempting to reconstruct’ the events. By the end they claim vindication for their version of what happened, but it’s clear that its details are speculation. No 12-year-old could possibly write Laurie Lelandes’s journal; and even the newspaper article on the girls’ disappearance which opens the narrative seems like no local journalism I’ve ever read. Then there is the setting. Now, Emma Tennant had a house in Netherbury for many years, so she knew the area well; and that raises questions about how it is intended to be understood in the book. The girls are on a walk from Beaminster to Melplash, which would be demanding enough for six-year-olds; they disappear on the lane to Mapperton, and wind up ten miles away at Abbotsbury (albeit they make part of that journey in an abandoned landrover). From there they go by boat to Portland and, right at the end, resurface at exactly the point they got lost in the first place, without anyone on the ground having encountered them. Anyone familiar with the landscape knows this is impossible. Did Emma Tennant intend it to be taken literally, or is it merely a set of elements to hang a narrative from, its representation connected only loosely with the real places? Dorset natives will find it hard to suspend their disbelief.

Queen of Stones was critically very well-received in 1982; Emma Tennant’s Tess, a recasting of Thomas Hardy’s great novel twelve years later, less so. But I think I may have to get that too!

Fair Enough

The infants school have removed the last of their pandemic measures and that means they’ve returned to activities that mix year groups. Yesterday I did my first whole-school assembly since March 2020, though the school have been having them for a while. The new time, ten past nine, is a bit of a challenge as for me it means either saying Morning Prayer earlier than its customary start time of 9am or later (earlier makes more sense). Was that set in stone? I asked the head teacher. ‘Not in granite, but I’d say in sandstone’, she replied.

Neither the Church calendar nor school life lent me a clear topic to talk about. Some of the children were at the Spring Fair on Saturday to do country dancing, but, as I told them, there are no stories about fairs in the Bible, and while some people do dance you can’t describe those incidents as stories (actually you could make a story out of David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant and being despised by Michal his wife, or indeed of Salome doing her turn, but neither would make for a very edifying narrative). Instead I thought of Woodbury Hill in Dorset where the great Fair – one of the biggest in southern England, in its day – probably began after a hermit came to live in the old hillfort in the 12th century, and an annual gathering was set up by the landowner, Tarrant Abbey, to support them, whoever they were. There was even a holy well there whose waters were drunk by visitors to the Fair. So I made up a bit of a story about a holy man (‘We don’t know his name, let’s call him John’) and how the Fair might have started. I even had a couple of photos to show, one of the Fair in full swing in about 1910, and one I took of the hilltop in 2017, now bare apart from a farmhouse and cows, as you can see here.

It struck me that this is a bit like the stories in saints’ lives, woven out of a few things people did know and a lot of supposition about what must have happened. Possibly some of what is in the Bible isn’t too far from that either. Talking of things half-remembered and half made-up, I’d thought my grandparents had met at Woodbury Hill Fair, but checking back I discovered it was the Ilchester Flower Fair at the Lamb & Lark in Limington, which must have been a much humbler occasion. Nan remembered that Grandad and his brother Alec were there, Alec with his arm in plaster having broken it in the gate-jumping contest. Grandad asked Nan to stay to the dance and so she did. I don’t think we’ll have a gate-jumping contest at the Spring Fair next year.

Abbotsbury in April

St Catherine's Chapel at Abbotsbury seems different on every visit. The weather is an aspect of that: on this occasion (Bank Holiday Monday) it was bright, but not especially warm. Lots of people were about, and a couple of children stumbled in while I was in the middle of the Office Hymn. As I left I could hear them trying out the famous acoustic: perhaps they wouldn't have, had they not heard me. The other changing aspect is the prayers people leave in the wall niches. There were two little stones decorated with Ukraine hearts, a range of love tokens ('we were engaged here 14.2.2022'), prayers of remembrance, and some heartache: 'I wish I had a child', read one. Although none of the prayers address St Catherine by name at the moment (that has been a trend in the past, but I've not observed it for some time), one either unwittingly or by design picked up on the traditional use of the chapel: 'Dear God/Universe, whatever. Please can I meet my love. I think I'm ready now.'

Beautiful Badbury

A trip to Dorset to see my family managed to squeeze in a walk round Badbury Rings. I can always rely on the Rings to take me out of myself even if I do nothing more than follow the same route, from the car park and between the ramparts, straight across the interior and past the orientation plaque to curve right around the rampart and back to the car. In a way it's the ritualisation of the walk that helps - plus the history, and the views.

Recasting the Past

A zoom down to Dorset to celebrate my birthday brought the chance to revisit two museums which have been completely refurbished over the last few years. The mighty County Museum in Dorchester, which I reported on in 2017, is all but unrecognisable inside. They are understandably keen to recoup some of the enormous cost of the rebuilding, and so not only is there now a rather steep entrance charge but the one-time centrepiece of the whole museum, the Victorian Hall, its galleries jam-packed with miscellaneous social-history collectanea, is now an 'events space' - I could only peer into it and watch it being set with tables for rich people to come and eat at. The new organising space is a colossal Brutalist stairwell with the Fordington Mosaic up one wall, a bit like the Ashmolean's only rougher, with the exhibition areas opening off it: those are sleek and imaginatively laid out, and ever so slightly antiseptic. I know it's churlish to quibble at that, especially when four years ago I was complaining about it being a bit old-fashioned! I wonder whether even more of the collections could be brought out, now there is so much space to display them in. 

I have more invested in what used to be the Priest's House Museum in Wimborne and is now the Museum of East Dorset, as it was my workplace in 1991 and 1992. I was there in the midst of the great refurbishment which marked its transformation from an essentially volunteer-run, somewhat quaint little place to a more professional set-up whose arrangements were shaped around historical and architectural knowledge. Stephen, the curator, had a vision of exploring the very varied history of the building through the people who had lived there, decorating a series of rooms to fit in with those themes based on the fragments visible in them. Expensive handmade mannequins were purchased and displayed. So the entrance area became an old-fashioned ironmonger's; grumpy Victorian Mr Low glowered behind his counter in the stationery shop; in the Georgian parlour, Mrs King consulted with her plumber whose initials had been found on the lead rainwater heads; and in a 17th-century back room an anonymous woman we all called Harriet sat sewing against a background of painted wallcloths based on those surviving in Owlpen Manor. Every day the first and last jobs (which fell to me when I was on duty) were to take down or replace the wooden shutters along the bow-fronted windows: Stephen had had these reconstructed to recreate the 18th-century shop frontage.

Thirty years later and all of this has gone. Mannequins are certainly not flavour of the day any more, notwithstanding how well-made they are; the bow-fronted windows have been replaced by a plate-glass panel. Not only has a lot of the reconstruction been driven by the need to provide a fully-accessible space, but the whole display philosophy is different - instead of a succession of period rooms, the construction of the building is highlighted. Upstairs there is a massive stone fireplace I don't even recall existing, which must have been covered up behind later plasterwork. I can't work out where the Tinsmith's Forge was: it was an horrendous mess, but still part of the history of the site, so I'm surprised it's gone completely. I spent several freezing days listing all the objects, and on my last visit, with Ms Formerly Aldgate back in 2013, was able to point out the little tags I'd put on them in 1991, left undisturbed, so it's probably understandable that they are all gone. The only things that remain from those far-off days are the Victorian Kitchen, and the mummified cat, which inhabits a tiny case upstairs and, I suspect, always will, as long as the museum survives! 

View from the Hill

The hill in question being Chapel Hill at Abbotsbury. I am on leave this week and St Catherine's Chapel is now open again so I made my way there, as always wondering whether I will be back again one day. The lowering clouds over Portland and the Fleet avoided the hill itself and while the long closure will have emptied the niche where the votive deposit gets left there are candle stubs and prayer notes again, and some hopeful evangelist has donated some more substantial devotional literature.